1: Immutable fields,
I have business object which have fields that are supposed to be immutable.
Adding a setter is WRONG, and using access ="field" doesn't work with the JVM security manager enabled. (neither do private default constructors)
I need a way for the mapping to set these object up using a constructor.
A custom type isn't workable because these objects also contain Sets;

(incidentally, a method comparable to Query.list() that returned a set would be really nice)

2: Recursive Collections.
I would really really like to be able to store a set of lists, or a map of sets. I have a couple of places where this would be a much better solution than the map of objects that contain only a set, which I currently use, and would much rather I didn't.

While I'm at it, I think I'll read off the whole laundry list.

Why cant I pass the org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration object a mapping object? giving it an xml string seems kinda stupid.

and meaningful xml parsing error messages.
When I add a key to a tag that doesn't support it, it should tell me that the key is not valid in that context, instead of insisting that the new (wrong) key MUST exist and MUST have a value.

sigh.
so close, and yet, so frustrating.